Mobile applications typically embed an Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”) renderer (“web view”) to display HTML content. Providing a web view within a mobile application allows the content provider more flexibility than a proprietary user interface. Furthermore, a web view may reduce portability issues between various platforms. For example, an editor may create the layout for a given article and may deploy that article on any device that contains a web view or browser.
Content providers often incorporate analytic services and/or libraries to track usage data in real-time, e.g., which links were clicked, how long a user viewed a particular article, what content was most popular, where the user is geographically located, etc. Content providers often use the results to determine a popular demographic, to maximize page impressions, to gauge the effectiveness of certain layouts, to determine the most relative content, to calculate the top referring sites that most frequently bring users to a specific page, etc. Indeed, analytic service providers are generally selected based on uptime, data resolution, and latency.
On mobile devices, however, a connection to a network, e.g., the Internet, cannot always be maintained; furthermore, latency can create a bottleneck, slowing uploads, and reducing the battery life of the device. To improve the user experience, some of these mobile applications pre-fetch content to be viewed offline within the web view. While pre-fetching content to be viewed offline provides the user with a better experience, the content provider is left without any usage data since the usage data cannot be uploaded while offline.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.